'His Dark Materials' Season 1 Episode 1 Recap: "Lyra's Jordan"
It's been a long road to the television adaptation of His Dark Materials, the obsessively popular young adult fantasy series from Philip Pullman. After a disastrous first outing as a Harry Potter-like film series (starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Dakota Blue Richards), the series never made it to a sequel. The rights went dormant, as New Line Cinema shelved them before being swallowed up by Warner Bros. Pictures. It took until 2015 for Pullman to get them back and resell them to the BBC for a Game of Thrones-like TV series.
And yet delays continued. It's been almost four years to the day since the BBC announced it would create the series, and in that time, the television landscape has shifted enormously. Had a series come out in 2016, or even early 2018, His Dark Materials might have felt fresher, or at least like a continuation of HBO's top-rated "expensive prestige fantasy series" hits. As it is, the first episode shows how far the genre has come and how much expectations have risen.
In creating a parallel universe, writer Jack Thorne (Harry Potter & The Cursed Child) and director Tom Hooper (Les Miserables, Cats) have done a remarkable job of making this a place that feels lived-in. But that also works against the series; as the magical alternate reality whizzes by, treated as mundane parts of the landscape.
